AO3 - Bowlby's Theory of Maternal Deprivation

• Bowlby highlights the importance of positive attachment experiences and maintaining a monotropic bond in the first five years, which has useful practical applications.
• Practical applications for parents and caregiver providers is useful in supporting children who have been in institutional care.
• Some countries like Sweden offer 480 days parental leave, clearly highlighting its commitment to support children’s early attachment experiences.
• As Bowlby was asking the adolescent participants to recall separations that they had experienced years earlier, their responses would have been subject to inaccuracies/ distortions.
• Bowlby designed and conducted the self-reports himself and as a result, his presence and interpretation might have influenced the outcome of the research.
• Bowlby's research was conducted by himself which makes it more subjective.
• Bowlby found a relationship between early separation and delinquency/ affectionless psychopathy but we cannot definitively conclude that the separation was the cause.
• Bowlby's research is correlational suggesting problems with cause and effect.
• Bowlby's supporting research relied on retrospective data which could be unreliable.
• Rutter (1981) offers an alternative negative experience called privation (never having formed an attachment bond).
• Bowlby's research focused on the mother as the primary caregiver which may not be the case in all circumstances.
• Bowlby's ideas were from the 1940s and 50s where gender roles were different, suggesting they may lack temporal validity.
• Bowlby suggested maternal deprivation caused irreversible negative effects but other research contradicts this.
• Koluchova (1976) reported the case of the Czech twins who suffered abuse until the age of 7 but were able to reform secure attachments after adoption.
• Lewis (1954) found no association between early separation and later psychopathy.
• Gao et al (2010) supports Bowlby by showing poor quality maternal care was associated with high rates of psychopathy in adults.